JavaScript:
- invented in one week by the infamously homophobic white guy that was forced to resign from Mozilla and now runs Brave
- not secretly a Lisp, despite what techbros who've never used a Lisp think
- used to track your browsing habits by giant opaque privacy violation machines controlled by billionaires
- encourages development practices that cause basic discussion forums that used to fit comfortably in 32MB in the 90s to take hundreds of megabytes of RAM instead
+ Mastodon web UI needs it to work
@lifning
+: Much like Unity, its approachability and low skill threshold is having a democratizing effect on code in general
-: Democratization and low skill threshold create a neverending tide of code horrors that would otherwise not exist
-: js doesn't really have the right syntactic sugar to coax those object shoggoths into less limacine shapes.
?: we haven't had the js equivalent of java's Minecraft moment, where people realized it's good for anything any other language is for. But with NPM and browserify, we've got all the right tooling. Whatever triggers it, that moment's coming up soon.
@lifning
C:
- development of advanced software is very complicated
- one simple mistake has terrible consequences
- responsible for many dangerous vulnerabilities
- used to develop malware
+ a lot of important software is written in C
@anatol_at basically my point, yeah :p like, these somewhat undesirable legacy languages have become primitives at the foundation of modern programming... but that's what we've got.
wanna make a foreign function call from language 1 to language 2? it's probably going through C!
wanna run language 3 in a web client? if it's not JavaScript, you're gonna transpile to it!
i guess there's a question of whether the misuses outweigh the benefits, but mass migration would be very labor-intensive.
@lifning whoa whoa whoa, Mastodon doesn't *need* Javascript to work, we could quit it anytime we want!
@lifning Single-threaded by design, so stuff that you used to be able to build on one box and serve to thousands of people now requires dozens of servers behind heavy network hardware to scale beyond a single office worth of people.
@lifning Also... -Node, and -Electron
@lifning I think you could actually recreate most of mastodons UI with <frame>s (yes!) and <meta http-equiv="refresh"β¦>
@lifning I mean without any js. :P
@phryk that would be hilarious and someone should totally do it, if only as a joke :p
@lifning Can't live with it. Can't live without it :) Every time I try to learn it my brain kinda bounces off :)
@lifning Good WASM DOM bindings can't come soon enough